There is no They.

Mountain Xpress

August 01, 2012

This is one of those occasions where my day job and the topics in this blog collide. Asheville, the city where I live, is in the middle of the least-unionized region in the least-unionized state in America.

“I have never seen a company run like this,” Brian Lane declares. “I'm here to work; I have a wife and children to support, and these people are sitting here making money hand over fist off the sweat of my back.”

An injury forced Lane, a former electrician, to change jobs. Gathering with fellow employees after work, he brandishes a form from a Hendersonville food pantry.

“That's where I have to go if I want to feed my family,” says Lane. “No matter how hard we work, the sword of Damocles is over our heads.”

---

As the region’s manufacturing base dwindled over the last several decades, local unions saw their membership decline, though many have claimed growth recently. No widespread data is yet available for that time period, however. And despite WNC unions' deep roots, historically they’ve mostly kept to themselves.

“We were all looking out for our own interests, but now we're starting to communicate and ally like nothing I've ever seen before,” says IBEW state coordinator Matthew Ruff. Despite membership growth, he asserts, “We're not fighting for another 5 to 10 percent of market share: We're fighting for our existence”

Low wages have been a major problem in Asheville for a long time: despite our reputation as a cultured, lovely city, they're about $100 a week lower than the state average. On a larger level, union membership has declined nationwide and in many other industrialized countries as well, to the point they're now often viewed as a holdover from a bygone era. Even the more liberal futurists rarely bring up unions in their plans for tomorrow. Working on this story, I ran into plenty of fairly well-informed people that weren't aware that trying to organize a union is perfectly legal anywhere in the country.

Unions seem to have sprang back into the public consciousness a bit more in recent years, especially as they've taken a more proactive approach and faced high-profile fights in a number of states. But it's still unclear if organizing drives like the one above are a blip or the cutting edge of a revived labor movement.

So let's use this as a launching pad for a larger discussion. Are unions making a comeback? Are they a useful way to improve conditions for the average person? If they're not, what works better? Are there other forms of organizing more suited to evolving conditions? What are they?

May 07, 2010

Last Saturday, May Day, a vandalism
spree in downtown Asheville left several buildings damaged, including
a number of local businesses. The ensuing reaction from just about
every faction of the community was anger and confusion. That’s
justified; the hysteria some are spreading is not.

In connection with the crime, the
police have arrested 11 people, most from out of town. Two of those
arrested have connections to anarchist groups, and anarchist Web
sites have rallied to find bail money for “The Asheville 11,” a
predictable dubbing if ever there was one. Interestingly, the comment
threads filled up with locals — including anarchists — condemning
the vandalism, which hit mostly independent, locally-owned businesses
(as well as an RBC Centura ATM and the Asheville Citizen-Times).

Then there’s A few questions for the
Anarchists in Asheville by Citizen-Times writer John Boyle, which
begins “I’m trying to think of a stupider, more illogical
movement than anarchy, but I’ve come up dry.”

The title of Boyle’s piece is
particularly ironic, as the majority of the accused rioters aren’t
from Asheville. He proceeds to up the vitriol to 11:

“To protest capitalism and
government, every year on May 1 a bunch of these self-important fools
get together. Sometimes they throw a party or stage legitimate
protests, but this time they opted to randomly destroy stuff, the end
result being a bunch of business owners and the city now having to
waste money to fix it back up.”

There were indeed a number of May 1
gatherings in Asheville — it’s a traditional day for leftist
political protest — some involving issues such as immigration
reform. One, in Aston Park, was a party with an anti-capitalist bent
(“Cause capitalism dies a little bit every time we have fun without
it,” according to its Facebook page). While police are looking into
the event, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, there’s absolutely
no indication that a singular “they” went from there to rioting.
By all indications, the vast majority of the people in Aston Park
threw a party of the non-glass-shattering variety.

Now, anarchism isn’t remotely my
creed, and it probably isn’t yours either, but there’s a massive
difference between someone whose beliefs drive them to such nefarious
actions as running a community garden or free book exchange and the
beliefs of the thug busting up a local business. Such distinctions
are, apparently, lost to Boyle. Here there’s just “they.”

Funny, when sports fans rampage, I
never see media mavens calling for a crackdown on athletics, or
issuing angry condemnations about how dangerous hockey or basketball
devotees are. The rioters are just idiots, and viewed as a violent
exception among the larger number of people who enjoyed the game
peacefully. Nor do people confuse snake handlers, for example, as
representing all Christians. An anarchist breaks a window, and
suddenly they’re all vandals in our midst. Right.

Boyle also forgets something
journalists must maintain, no matter how much we are angered by a
crime: the presumption of innocence. The police have arrested 11
people and charged them for the destruction of that night. At the
coming trial, the state will have to present its evidence and prove,
beyond a reasonable doubt, that the 11 were not simply anarchists or
in the wrong place at the wrong time, but rioters. That’s how it
should work.

April 23, 2010

First off, a special thank you to Adriel Hampton and Tim O'Reilly for the kind words via Twitter about my Durable Infection post. That's set off some interesting insights and brought in some new readers. I should offer a welcome to anyone reading over this blog for the first time. For those of you who left comments or sent me your thoughts on the piece, I'd also like to thank you: I'll respond in the next few days and try to give them the attention they deserve.

Because amidst the President arriving in Asheville, I was traveling the opposite direction, to a long-planned mini-vacation in my homeland, the North Carolina coast, where I plan to devour plenty of tasty seafood (including my personal favorite, raw oysters) and relax. Much as a part of me misses the energetic chaos, you have to occasionally set journalism aside, just for a bit, to stay sane in this job.

March 31, 2010

Mountain Xpress, where I labor in the news trenches, is fortunate to have some fantastic cartoonists working for it. I've praised Jonny Cantrell's work in this space before. Brent Brown is also an excellent satirist, and today he's crafted this gem, which gets to the heart of the sorry, sorry state of broadcast media:

Xpress’ reporting on the topic,
including the explanation Shuler issued Monday, has set off a torrent
of comments, many calling Shuler a DINO (Democrat in Name Only) or
other epithets and many asserting that he just lost their vote.
Shuler, who received more contributions from health insurance
companies than any other member of Democratic delegation, is being
painted by many as a corporate shill.

Given Asheville’s left-learning
political culture, that’s understandable: Outside the Tea Party and
other conservative activists, many of the Ashevillean criticisms one
heard in the months leading up to Sunday’s vote was that the bill
didn’t go nearly far enough.

Now the question, however, is if anger
at Shuler will hurt his chances for re-election, especially in the
upcoming Democratic primary. Probably not.

If the 11th Congressional District was
limited to Asheville or even Buncombe, I wouldn’t give Shuler very
good odds of going back to Washington next year. It doesn’t,
however — but rather, it stretches all the way to the Tennessee,
Georgia and South Carolina state lines. In the 2008 Presidential
election, Barack Obama swept Buncombe, getting 56 percent of the
vote. Not so in the overall district, which John McCain won, 52-47.
The Cook Partisan Voting Index, which rates how much a district tends
toward one party or another, puts the 11th at Republican +6.

Of course, stats don’t predict
everything. Before Republican Rep. Charles Taylor’s long reign
(which Shuler ended), the 11th was alternatively held by the very
conservative Bill Hendon and the very liberal James Clarke.
Determined candidates with well-organized operations and a rapport
with the voters can buck trends.

Aixa Wilson, who’s challenging Shuler
in the Democratic primary, has become a frequent topic of
conversation as the progressive backlash increased and, likely now,
as Shuler’s “nay” vote helps Wilson. But there’s no evidence
yet of Wilson running the sort of aggressive campaign necessary to
unseat an incumbent like Shuler. His Web site is vague about his
platform, mostly consisting of promises to read legislation and stay
away from moneyed interests (I’m waiting for the day when a
politician publicly promises to pass legislation sight unseen and
love lobbyists with all their heart). There’s no announcement, for
example, of a sharply defined position on health care that might
rally disaffected Dems to Wilson’s banner. Instead there’s an
announcement, dated March 12, that he’ll listen to his
constituents. It has three comments.

Also, despite Asheville’s seeming
love of all things political — and status as the largest population
center in the District — there’s no tightly-organized progressive
turnout operation that might throw its support to Wilson in an effort
to punish Shuler.

March 16, 2010

In November 2009, 12,648 voters decided
who would lead the city of Asheville.

To put those numbers in perspective,
that’s 19.6 percent of the city’s registered voters or roughly
one in five. To put it in starker terms: this number is the lowest
turnout ever in a municipal election, beating 2007’s city council
elections for that dubious honor. Despite economic difficulties, a
mayoral race (albeit a rather one-sided one) and two of the victors
putting their emphasis on large volunteer operations, four out of
five Asheville voters chose to stay at home.

Looking closer at the numbers, the
picture doesn’t improve. Montford, often touted as an activist
hotbed, only narrowly exceeded the average, with a 20 percent
turnout. Its citizenry came out comparatively well, the city’s
other four most populous precincts saw turnout at or under the city
average.

Minority voters turned out by lower
percentages, with only 15.6 percent of black voters showing up to the
polls, and just 10 percent of Hispanic voters.

It’s true that many voters don’t
show up for municipal elections, even during hotly contested years.
Still, added to 2007’s decline (22 percent of the city’s voters
turned out for that race), this represented a fairly rapid drop in
public participation in elections.

However, you wouldn’t have known it
by the rhetoric.

“We rocked this city tonight!”
newly elected council member Cecil Bothwell proclaimed at his victory
celebration.

“I think the voters are a true
reflection of Asheville,” Esther Manheimer said, adding. “I think
the people have given City Council a mandate.”

This was something of a change in
attitude for Manheimer. After her primary victory a scant few weeks
earlier, she called the low turnout a challenge, and declared “it’s
our job to reach people, to get them to the polls by any means
necessary.”

Twitter was all a-twitter, both during
the primary and general elections, with proclamations of Asheville’s
grassroots coming of age and similar such hyperbole.

This isn’t to speak for or against
the policies of anyone elected that night, but the victory talk needs
to be tempered, four months on, by some cold facts that tell a far
different story: it is absolutely absurd to pretend that a large drop
in voter turnout represents a triumph of popular activism.

January 27, 2010

My article on the clash between activists and bureaucrats over the "imminent threat" of contamination at the former CTS of Asheville plant is in this week's Mountain Xpress:

It was a tense moment in the T.C. Roberson High School theater on the evening of Jan. 21. Sandy Mort of the state Department of Health and Human Services, the author of a recent study on the health effects of contamination near the former CTS of Asheville site (see sidebar), had just told the audience that a bus stop near the site posed no hazard. For the better part of three hours, the HHS staffer had heard a litany of neighboring residents' tales of personal pain, criticisms of the study and calls to clean up the source of the trichloroethylene contamination.

"Do you have a heart? Do you hear what these people are saying?" one woman shouted.

Holding the microphone close to her mouth, Mort gave a slight sigh and said, "We work with the information we have; that's reality."

---

Residents repeatedly questioned the study's finding that although there were 64 cases in the study area of types of cancer that could be related to TCE exposure, there was no elevated cancer rate. Mort acknowledged that the study's methods do have limitations but added that her agency would continue to update its studies.

Residents, however, countered with tales of cancer and maladies that they believe are linked to the tainted ground water they unknowingly consumed for many years. Although the first EPA tests were conducted in 1991, the first wells weren't capped until 1999.

"We've had a lot of medical problems in our family," said Becky Robinson, whose home was among the first to be put on city water. "We have had no medical recommendations, no guidance, nothing. We had to get our own medical testing. My two grandchildren's immune systems came back compromised. Nothing has been done; nobody has contacted us. My daughter's had lots of medical problems. Her liver started failing, she had a total hysterectomy at 23, seizures, multiple knee operations for cysts. We drank the water for nine years; we fixed our children's bottles with this water. All of them have health problems."

Mort said she thought public-health professionals had been in touch, but Dot Rice, whose well was also capped in 1999, said she hadn't heard from any public doctors until last week.

"We've got staff that can talk to your physicians," said Dr. Doug Campbell, who heads the state agency's Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch.

December 29, 2009

My article on possible racial profiling in Asheville was the cover story in last week's issue of the Mountain Xpress. It's an attempt to tackle a thorny topic, taking a look at the statistics and the cases of two people with clean criminal records facing run-ins with law enforcement that they believe were partially racially motivated.

There's the numbers:

Between Nov. 1, 2008, and Oct. 31 of this year, the APD reported making 6,264 traffic stops. Of those stopped, 873 (13.9 percent) were African-Americans. According to census data, roughly 17 percent of Asheville residents are African-American. Hispanics, meanwhile, accounted for 215 of those APD stops (3.4 percent); 5 percent of Asheville's population is Hispanic. So, by that measure, the statistics give no hint of racial profiling.

Once stopped, however, African-American men are statistically far more likely to be searched. During that same time period, the APD reported conducting 509 car searches. Of those, 180 — more than a third — involved black males.

Then the case of Navy veteran Russell Johnson:

"We wanted to get away from the Bele Chere weekend crowds," he remembers. "The park rangers were breaking down a DUI checkpoint, and I was taking pictures on the Mills River Bridge. The moon was a sliver: It was red and so beautiful, and I just had to get a picture."

Johnson's car was parked on the other side of the bridge, and he walked over to talk to the rangers before heading back to his vehicle.

"When I walked up to one of the cars — there were four at the entrance — I waved and said, 'I really appreciate what y'all are doing, keeping us safe on the Parkway.' I asked how long it would take to get to Pisgah from here," says Johnson, who wanted to get more photographs before the light faded. "He told me — and this is a park ranger — he didn't know what I was talking about."

On video, Johnson can be clearly seen walking up to the car and waving, though his words aren't audible. Three rangers emerge from surrounding vehicles and direct Johnson to put his hands behind his back.

"I obliged, and they started searching me, going through my little fanny pack, which just had my flashlight, my compass — things you use in the woods," says Johnson. "One of the rangers grabbed my hands and shoved them up between my shoulder blades."

The impact was so hard that Johnson will now require surgery for a damaged disc, hospital documents confirm. "I get dizzy: I'm a disabled veteran with some nerve troubles; this didn't help things," he says.

And finally, local musician Jonathan Scales:

"I came out of The Rocket Club, I saw a friend of mine, happened to be my Realtor (I was buying a house at the time). I went to say 'hey' to him, but he was on the phone and I didn't want to disturb him, so I shook his hand," remembers Scales. "I walked a couple of blocks down and this police officer stops me and asked if I knew the man at the gas station. He told me, 'I saw that handshake; it looked kind of suspicious.'"

Scales told Officer Kelly Radford that the person was his real-estate agent.

"Basically, at that point he accused me, said, 'Well, it looked like a drug deal,'" Scales relates. "I was shocked. I've never done drugs a day in my life. He took my ID; he asked if I minded if he searched me. I told him I did mind, that I hadn't done anything wrong; he would just be wasting his time."

According to Scales, Radford then told him that if he was innocent, he wouldn't object to being searched.

"I didn't know a handshake counted as probable cause, that it was suspect," Scales says with a chuckle. "It was apparent I wasn't getting out of it. I refused it for about five minutes, then I let him search me. I was against the cop car, his hands on top of my hands, I got the whole pat-down treatment."

"Jonathan Scales was searched by an APD officer, pursuant to consent, based on actions that appeared to the officer to be a hand-to-hand transaction of some type (and not a mere handshake greeting) on Haywood Road," she wrote Xpress in response to questions about the incident. "No contraband was discovered, and the officer apologized to Mr. Scales for delaying him."

December 10, 2009

Our argumentative online culture, religious conflict and Asheville have all collided nicely this week. From my Mountain Xpress write-up of the "controversy" over new Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell:

It seems the only place people aren’t shouting about this week’s swearing in of new Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell is Asheville. Blogs, including that of the Washington Post, have lit up about the “controversy” over Bothwell, a “post-theist” who earlier identified as an atheist, taking his seat.

The controversy began with Asheville Citizen-Times stories on Monday and Tuesday. The latter was titled, “Critics of Cecil Bothwell Cite N.C. Bar to Atheists.” It quoted only one opponent, H.K. Edgerton, a former president of the Asheville NAACP best known locally for walking around town brandishing a Confederate flag, as saying that the state constitution would keep Bothwell, a builder, author and former Xpress writer and editor, from holding office.

While article 6, section 8 of the North Carolina Constitution does deny office to “any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God,” such state bans have been routinely trumped by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly prohibits any religious tests for public office. A similar ban in Maryland was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1961.

Since the articles came out, the proverbial Internet flood gates have opened, with national blogs from across the political spectrum weighing in, including such varied groups and viewpoints as Americans United For Separation of Church and State, Hot Air, Thought Crimes, Atheist News and Views, One Good Move, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religous Liberty and the interestingly named House of Zot. USAtheists even declared that Bothwell was denied his seat, which he wasn’t.

For all the hubbub elsewhere, Bothwell, who came in third in the November election, took his seat in City Hall on Tuesday without event, choosing to affirm his oath of office instead of swear on a copy of the Bible. No one shouted, no one tried to seriously challenge his right to do so, and he got an enthusiastic round of applause.

Former Asheville firefighter Charles Alexander Diez will spend four months in prison for shooting cyclist Alan Simons in July. Diez plead guilty to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill yesterday.

On July 26, Simons was riding with his family on Tunnel Road. According to Asheville police, Diez had stopped to argue with Simons, saying that the child seat the cyclist’s 3-year-old son was riding in was unsafe. As Simons began walking away, Diez fired his handgun, the .38-caliber bullet tearing through the back of Simons’ bike helmet, less than an inch from his head. Diez has no prior criminal record and was sober at the time. While he was originally suspended with pay at the time of the incident, on Aug. 10 he ended employment with the Asheville Fire Department.

While Diez was originally charged with attempted first-degree murder, a grand jury refused to press those charges, instead indicting him on the felony assault charge.

Convictions on such a charge result in an average 20-39 months in prison for the defendant. But in the sentencing, Superior Court Judge James Downs found that Diez’s military service, along with testimony from former colleagues about his good character, were mitigating factors, and chose to sentence him to 15-27 months instead. Downs suspended all but four months of that sentence unless Diez breaks the law again in the next 30 months. As part of his sentence, Diez is required to attend anger-management training and pay $1,200 to cover Simons’ medical costs for damage to his eardrum.